The present invention relates to on-demand web analytics, and in particular to session-based analytics.
Companies hosting web sites have a need to monitor how effective those websites are. The most basic tracking approach is to record basics data on the number pages viewed and the number of visitors to the web site. More advanced applications track a host of additional detailed features and elements of a website. The data collected include what parts of a website a user clicks on, when a user chooses to include an item in the shopping cart, purchase an item, and other shopping actions, registration events, viewing of products, payments actions, etc. Typically, tags are associated with different resources on a web site to track such activities.
More recently, tracking has been done not just of URL based resources, but also of local applications downloaded from a web site as part of a web page and run locally on a user's computer. Such local applications include Flash and Ajax. This has been described as tracking the applications within a web resource by using ActionScript and/or Java Script, the languages used to write such applications.
The data collected by the tracking software is stored in a database, where it is analyzed, validated, checked and formatted. The processing and storing of the tracking data in the database requires substantial time. Examples of validating collected data include eliminating duplicate click data, and comparing the collected click data to established limits to eliminate probable click fraud. The data, after processing and based on established business rules, is then presented to the client (the company that owns the website) using various delivery mechanisms such as a browser application, data downloads, data exports, web based API, emails, and other delivery mechanisms.
A web site may also be tracked based on user sessions. IBM US Published Application No. 20040054784, entitled “Method, system and program product for tracking web user sessions” describes one such system. When a user requests a web page, code within the web page generates a unique identifier which is transmitted to the analytics server along with an identification of the web site and the referring web site. The analytics server then downloads a session cookie so that activity with respect to that session can be tracked.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram of an example of a tracking system. A web server 10 provides web pages, flash, and other local applications 14 that are addressable by URLs 12. Each of these web based resources has an associated tag 16 and 18, respectively, for tracking clicks by users 20. The tags collect the user click information and transmit it over the internet 22 to a web analytics server or tracking server 24.
Web analytics server 24 collects the data received by a web server 19 with a collector component 26, and assembles queues of data in transformer components 28. The transformed data is then loaded into a database 32 by a loader 30. The data in the database is analyzed, checked, and validated over time, then provided to a user using various delivery mechanism such as a browser application, data downloads, data exports, web based API, emails, and other delivery mechanisms from a web reporter server 25 through Internet 22 to a client computer 34.